Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969)

Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969)
Dir.: Marv Newland
Cel Bloc Rating: 8/9

I can remember the first time that I saw Bambi Meets Godzilla. It was on HBO when I was a teenager in the late '70s and my dad, whom we only visited every other weekend, had moved into a condo in East Anchorage. The cartoon was shown in one of those open segments between movies where the cable channel would show any number of short films, interviews, or movie trailers to fill the gap between feature films, boxing matches, and concerts.

I wrote recently about another one of these shorts shown on HBO in those days, that may be of interest to animation buffs, called Recorded Live, released in 1975. The difference between the two films is that I actually videotaped Recorded Live eventually, quite by accident, and watched it many times over the years until the tape either got eaten or was lost. Whatever happened, I lost track of it and didn't see Recorded Live for many, many years until earlier in 2015.

Bambi Meets Godzilla is another matter. There was no buildup to the film, and I had no idea what the next film was even going to be called. I just looked at the screen (I can't even remember if my brothers were watching with me at the time), and there was a traditional countdown clock like when you watch a film reel on a projector. Then a cartoon started featuring an all-white screen with a line drawing of a cute little deer standing amongst a rather spare field of flowers. The words Bambi Meets Godzilla popped up above the deer's backside, and there was a pastoral music theme (more on that later) that I recognized in my youth but did not really know what it was. The credits for the film roll by in a quite scattershot and low-budget fashion, and then WHAM! A giant, monstrous foot squashes the poor deer into the ground!!! This would be the appearance of Godzilla, in case you hadn't figured out where this was going yet. While the foot remained in place, the last of the credits flash on the screen. And the film is over.

I did not record the cartoon on videotape (we didn't have a machine for that quite yet), but looking back, I sure wished that I had at the time. Because after that brief viewing -- the cartoon is barely 90 seconds long -- I did not see Bambi Meets Godzilla on HBO again. But the mystery of the film was lodged in my head for eternity. What did I just see? Who is this Marv Newland, the guy whose name appears in the credits over and over? And who would do that to poor little Bambi?

Let's set some more time frame. While I had seen scenes of Walt Disney's Bambi throughout my youth on The Wonderful World of Disney, I did not see the feature film fully until it was rereleased to theatres in the summer of 1975, when I was eleven years old. Our babysitter, Mrs. B. drove my brothers, a couple of other kids she watched, and I into Anchorage from her home in Eagle River (where we grew up). Insisting on sitting in the backseat but deciding to read on the way, I got carsick and we had to stop the car so I could throw up. After the movie, we went to a BBQ place for lunch, which was the only time that I ate at that restaurant until about fifteen years later. (And now it is no longer there, but it is no loss.) Oh, yeah... and I remember a couple of the kids crying in the car on the way back to Eagle River because of what happens to Bambi's mother. And Mrs. B. had to gently talk them down and explain what had happened. Ah, Walt Disney... torturer of children's psyches.

But I digress... it's now four short years later, give or take, Bambi was still pretty alive in my memory, especially given how upsetting the film was when I saw it, and now I was being confronted with the fact that a monster with whom I was even more recently first acquainted had smashed a friendly cartoon deer flat on the screen in front of me. 

That's right... Godzilla had become my friend over those past few years. While I grew up always knowing what he looked like and who he was, I didn't see a film with Big "G" until NBC showed a dubbed version of Godzilla vs. Megalon, one of the worst of the series, on prime-time television in the summer of 1977. Best of all, it was hosted by John Belushi wearing a Godzilla costume. (He had also played Godzilla in a Saturday Night Live interview sketch, which I had seen because I was staying up late on Saturday nights to watch the show, sometimes under the radar, from the very start of its run.) After that, my new Godzilla fetish was fed constantly Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and by mid-afternoon matinee showings of monster and sci-fi movies on KTVA Channel 11, which I preferred to do instead of doing things like, oh you know, homework. Destroy All Monsters, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Mothra... I had them down already. So, by the time Bambi Meets Godzilla rolled around for me on HBO that day, I was fairly well acquainted with the parties involved in this Epic Battle for Supremacy of the Universe.

And then Bambi Meets Godzilla happened. My sense of humor was always intact, and I was fully immersed in parody and satire because of my love for MAD Magazine and its various offshoots and competitors. It was my sense of irony that was still being developed, even if I didn't understand the term at the time. And I remembering laughing hard at BMG when I first watched it, because... how could you not? The title was funny in and of itself, the credits were even funnier, and then there was the image of that huge reptilian foot crashing down on top of a cute little cartoon deer and crushing it until its little legs splayed and stuck out from underneath. To a kid or a teenager, that is always hilarious.

But there was something else... it kind of scared me a little. I have always been a little hypersensitive to how music makes me react to popular entertainment, even when it is meant to make me laugh or smile. There were a handful of clips of the Muppets on the original Sesame Street that served to give me the creeps mostly because of how music and sound effects were employed. Not so much when the clip would be shown, but later, when I would think about the music and what it triggered onscreen, I could give myself a chill. And Bambi Meets Godzilla did that for me in the same way.

But to get to that, let's go through the film. As I mentioned, there is a countdown film leader at the beginning of the short, whereupon we meet Bambi, or what we take to be the filmmaker's version of Bambi. This film being a parody, it rather escapes the use of copyright in securing the use of both of these characters, though such use on the part of the monster is remarked upon later in the credits. So, we will go with this being Bambi, for all intents and purposes and proceed onward.

There is the title that hangs above the little deer, and then the credits scroll slowly upward, though not in a steady way, and it is clear from the way they are quite crooked in their angle and the variance of speed as they make their way upward that this is a pretty ramshackle affair (however intentionally). Bambi forages amongst the flowers, lifting its head up and back down again to the Ranz des Vaches portion of Rossini's William Tell Overture. The music is often used in pastoral scenes in cartoons and films, and so its appearance here is to given the viewer an instant recognition that the mood is meant to be one of complacency and comfort.

As the deer continues to forage, occasionally tapping a hoof on the ground, the first of the credits appears. It reads, all lower case, "written by marv newland," and the viewer immediately goes, "Who is Marv Newland?" Then the next credit comes up reading, "screenplay by marv newland," and we realize that the joke is really on for good. The next credit says, "choreography by marv newland," and please keep in mind that to this point, we have just seen a deer lolling about in some flowers. What choreography? Do they mean fight choreography or dance choreography? Is this going to turn into a musical? Having never seen the film, and not knowing of its brevity, anything could happen at this juncture.

Then we know for sure we are being had. "bambi's wardrobe by marv newland" reads the next credit, which scrolls past slightly faster than the ones before, almost like the director is trying to slip one past us. Then the credits get slightly more serious with a "produced by marv newland" credit, but then shift back again with the best one yet, "marv newland produced by mr. & mrs. newland."

Up to now, Bambi has continued his foraging, but after the final credit hovers ever so briefly longer at the top of the screen, it disappears. Just under the minute mark of the film, Bambi looks up -- and then down comes the giant foot of Godzilla! It is quite cartoonish and somewhat blocky in shape, except for the toes that jut forward, and covered in scales that we assume would be green were this in color at all. (Yes, as you can see from the photos, it is in black and white. Deal with it... it's only ninety seconds.) The pastoral Rossini tune has been replaced with a long, ominous tone as the music crashes down in concert with the stomping of the foot like someone using a sledgehammer to smash in a piano lid. 

That ominous tone is held for the remaining thirty seconds of the cartoon. At the 1:08 mark, "the end" pops up one word at a time, and after being held shortly, disappears one letter at a time from the screen. They are replaced by "we gratefully acknowledge the city of tokyo," which itself is replaced by "for their help in obtaining godzilla for this film." The words disappear for good, and then, just in the last three seconds of the film, the monster's claws, static to this point, raise up and then go down creakily. The film fades to black.

It was that final chord with Bambi getting stomped, so dark and so unforgiving even while jokes are told upon the screen to the right of the monster's foot, that stuck with me. I knew the cartoon was supposed to be funny, but something else resonated with me. After all, if a cartoon deer wasn't safe from the rampaging of a giant fictional monster, how would any of us be safe? Even if I considered that monster a friend -- and this might be because I did not see the original Gojira film, where he is a full-on villain, until many years later, having watched any number of Toho movies to that point where he team up with other monsters to save the earth from even worse monsters -- Bambi Meets Godzilla gave me something that none of those equally silly films ever did... an actual scare, however determined by my own neuroses and fears.

And then, Bambi Meets Godzilla left me for a few years. I remembered it well, but I never saw it on HBO again. Thus, I never got a chance to possibly videotape it for my own eventual massive movie collection. But it did not totally disappear from my purview. In a few short years, animation festivals would come to a local independent theatre in Anchorage called the Capri Cinema, and I would attend every single one -- Spike and Mike's, etc. On a couple of occasions, BMG would be in the mix. In 1986, rockabilly artist Johnny Legend and Rhino Home Video put out a trio of Weird Cartoon collections, all of which I still own, and on which BMG could be found. That would be the moment when I started watching it quite regularly, and it became one of my favorite films to show people that had never encountered it before.

So, just who was this Marv Newland guy? Well, he eventually formed an animation company called International Rocketship and was instrumental for many years in distributing independent animated films around the world, in addition to creating his own. According to the book, The Fifty Greatest Cartoons (edited by Jerry Beck, 1994 Turner Publishing), Marv Newland put this film together as a film student in 1969 in Los Angeles, creating it in the last two weeks of the semester. The film shows it, certainly, but what he created has resonated enough with his fellow animators over the years that over a thousand of them voted Bambi Meets Godzilla #38 in that volume, mixed in between films from Walt Disney, the Fleischer Brothers, and Warner Bros. If that is not testament enough for how effectively the film works on an audience -- it sets up its premise clearly and bluntly, and pays off in hilarious fashion -- then I don't know how to convince you.

Me, I was convinced by a single showing on HBO one evening when I wasn't expecting it. And it has never left my mind...

RTJ

****

And in case you haven't seen it...

Countdown to Halloween: Spooks (1931)

Spooks (Ub Iwerks, 1931)
Director: Ub Iwerks
Music: Carl W. Stalling
Cel Bloc Rating: 7/9

So, what do you do in 1979 when you don't have a VCR yet, and a special comes on HBO with an incredible band that drives you nuts? You take your portable audiocassette recorder, hold the handheld microphone (yes) as steady as you can against the single television speaker and hope to heck that your brother doesn't talk while you are recording it. What was "it"? A comedy special, the name of which I could not remember for the longest time, but research has led me to find that the special was called George Segal's "Best Bets". Since I lost the audiotape recording in the early '90's, the special itself is mostly out of my memory.

But I do recall five details very well. The special was split between comedy and music acts, and it had a stand-up comedian on it named Jeff Altman (who would go on to star that same year in a spectacular failure of a primetime variety hour on NBC called Pink Lady and Jeff) and it also featured a comedy troupe called the War Babies. I thought both Altman and War Babies were hilarious on the show, but I was only 15 and literally laughing at everything. For all I can remember, what I found so knee-slapping back then would probably be met by me with stone silence and the swelling onset of loudly chirping crickets were I to view it today. Who knows? The other three details involve the music on the special. The first two involve the songs that were played by a punkish rock band: a song called Louise, partially sung in French, and an amphetamine version of the Beach Boys' classic California Girls, with the lyrics transposed to explain the travails of dating girls from the various planets of our solar system and why girls from the Sunshine State kick their asses. (I personally, for my own fetishistic designs, will always go for a girl from Neptune, who possesses a dozen arms and legs and three heads.) The final detail is that, through these two songs, I was introduced to a band called Oingo Boingo.

I think of Oingo Boingo whenever I watch older cartoons with their images of rampant spookiness and ambling, dancing skeletons. Disney's The Skeleton Dance, in particular, but there are several others that bring me that Boingo feeling, including numerous Betty Boop shorts with their Cab Calloway songs and lurking monsters. Much of this connection stems from the fact that brothers Richard and Danny Elfman used a lot of old cartoon footage in their stage productions and in the film The Forbidden Zone, and also because Oingo Boingo seemed to be a band which at all times found itself surrounded by images of skeletons and haunted house madness. And Danny Elfman, with his turns as the composer and singing voice for Tim Burton's stop-motion skeleton musicals The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, has done nothing to dissuade this continued connection to the ghoulish and reanimated.

It is absolutely no surprise then that my thoughts drift yet again to that favorite silly band of my teenage years (and really, I'm still hooked on them to this day) when I watch Ub Iwerks' Flip the Frog skeleton opus Spooks from 1931. The film rushes straight into a wonderfully evocative opening section, featuring the stormiest of dark and stormy nights ever beheld, as Flip the Frog struggles mightily to stay atop his skinnier-than-an-empty-feedbag horse. The wind keeps threatening to blow him off his mount, and the lightning crashes violently all about the pair as they make their way to a rickety shelter. No sooner are they under the structure than it blows away, but they are happy to see that they are only about thirty feet away from a shadow-engulfed house swaying before them in the hurricane winds. They struggle to march through the storm to the front porch, but reach it they do.

Flip knocks on the door, and we see the creepy silhouette of a sinister figure through the backlit window blind, his hands hanging downward like clawed things as it laughs maniacally. Flip does not notice the figure, and with all the fiery panache of Larry Fine, turns to the horse and calmly orders him to "Shut up." The door opens, seemingly of its own accord, but Flip enters anyway. Once inside, there is the sudden flash of lightning, and behind him, the door slams shut. Standing beside it is a skeleton dressed as a mutton-chopped butler. Flip jumps in shock, the lightning flashes again and the lights go out. Flip runs through the darkened house, until he screeches to a halt in a room where a skeleton wearing a top hat sits at a table in front of two plates, apparently waiting for another party to join him. Flip tries to flee the room, but the skeleton barks at him to stop, and then politely bids him to sit down. Flip sits down on a chair, and the thing gallops Flip over to the plate opposite the skeleton. "You're just in time to dine!", the skeleton announces, and it clangs a bell loudly for service.

The mutton-chopped butler reappears bearing a serving tray. He removes the lid, and Flip is treated to the sight of a steaming, succulent... uh, defleshed chicken carcass. The tailbone swipes back and forth of its own accord, and the host skeleton traps it with a fork and carves it off. He places it on Flip's plate, but the frog cheekily tells the host, "I don't like dark meat!" The host instead hands Flip a leg bone (which would still constitute dark meat, I might point out), and an angered Flip pretends to gnaw on the bone. Luckily for him, into the room walks a skeleton dog, who pauses in the doorframe for a sniff, and then, in a great Iwerks gag, lifts his leg as if to mark his territory, but then swings the leg all the way around to his neck to scratch at a flea. Surprisingly, there is a flea -- the skeleton of a flea pops out of the dog's neck and scuttles off across the floor. The dog smells the cooked chicken bones and makes his way eagerly to the table. (Somehow, it still has a tongue.)

Flip distracts the host and gives the legbone to the dog. Then Flip pretends to be chewing and swallowing the bone when the host turns back around. The host happily gives his guest another legbone, but the trick doesn't work this time, for the host turns around before Flip can fully hand off the bone to the dog. Flip has to pretend that the dog snatched it from him, but after a brief tug-of-war, Flip graciously offers the bone to the host. The host is overjoyed at this kindness, and chows down happily on the meal. The shards of bone from his mastication, however, fall through his ribcage and onto his chair between his thighs. (This is actually somewhat of an eerily revolting sight.) The skeleton has an easy fix for this, though, and simply hangs a small bucket beneath his ribs to catch the shards from his next bite.

Of course, it wouldn't be right for a cartoon done by Ub Iwerks to involve the presence of skeletons without adding in a swell musical interlude. A skeleton jazz trio thumps out a swell beat on bass, fiddle and piano, and a well-dressed skeleton lady steps across the floor to ask Flip to dance. Well-mannered amphibian that he is (at least, in this scene), Flip acquiesces to her request, and they hit the dance floor. A couple of times in their dance, Flip runs his fingers across her ribs like a xylophone, and she acts like a tickled schoolgirl, pushing him away as though he were a cad. They dance some more, and when they spin, Flip ends up dancing only with her separated top half, with the bottom following behind them. The second time it occurs, he ends up with her empty pelvic socket at eye level, as the torso dances off by itself. Pulling the ol' girl back together, Flip steps back to take a balletic leap into the lady's outstretched arms, but his crash only succeeds in shattering her into a heap of bones on the floor of the house.

The host skeleton laughs, but his facial expression betrays his ill intentions. (The evilly clutched hands rubbing together probably have something to do with this impression as well.) For whatever reason, the host has four display cases in a trophy room, and only three of them have skeletons inserted into them. The fourth is just exactly Flip's height, but the host pulls out a tape measure to sell the concept to us. Distracting the frog, the host points to a nearby cuckoo clock to remind Flip of the time. The cuckoo skeleton that pops out has trouble making its famous sound, but it spits out a plug of tobacco, and then cuckoos twice to signify the early hour. Flip yawns and stretches, but as he does so, his clothes magically turn into bedclothes, and a candleholder appears in his hand. He follows the host to some stairs, and as Flip climbs them, the host continues to check his measurements gleefully.

In the comfy-looking bedroom, Flip checks frantically under the bed for something, and the host is confused by this action. Flip whispers his problem to the host, and the skeleton points down the hall to the bathroom. (Love that Iwerks!) A sign on a wall points to the door, reading "This is IT!" If Flip even thought about "IT" for a second, he wouldn't go in the room; but, enter it he does, and his candle gets blown out immediately, and the skeleton sets upon him in the darkness!

There is much crashing about and fireworks, and when the lights come on, Flip is tied down to a table in a laboratory, and the host is hungrily testing the sharpness of a giant knife. Dissatisfied with the blade, he thrashes it on a strap a few times, but as he does, Flip flips the table over and runs off on all fours, with the table riding on his back. The skeleton host gives chase, but when Flip hits the stairs, he somersaults down, the ropes come loose, and he ends up riding the table like a toboggan down the bumpy steps. On the floor, he crashes through one, two, three skeleton guards, and then slides to seeming safety out the front door and onto the back of his faithfully waiting horse. He thumbs his nose triumphantly behind him, but the horse turns into a skeleton beneath him. Surprised, but no fool, Flip leaps off the horse's back and runs over a hill to escape the picture. Iris out.

I have heard some people compare this to Iwerks' earlier Disney classic The Skeleton Dance, from 1929. Sure, I guess it's reminiscent -- but only because they both have skeletons in them! The musical-and-dance sequence lasts a paltry 80 seconds out of an eight-minute running time, and the plot of Spooks, such as it is, is several steps more evolved than the basic "skeletons arise, dance, and then go back to the grave at sunrise" set-up. This is not a knock on the Disney film; no, not at all. It is a justly acclaimed classic and a highly important step in animation history. I'm merely pointing out that this later Iwerks film has nothing to do with the other film, except that it is Iwerks taking another crack at a film within the same genre. And doing it remarkably well... and fun.

I can't pretend to know of the Elfman brothers' influences and where they found the inspiration for the skeleton motif that runs through many of their projects, but I will take a guess that they received much of that notion from multiple viewings of cartoons just like Spooks and The Skeleton Dance and similar films. If they weren't influenced by these films, then the dots that I am connecting must have moved in from separate coloring books. But I can't hear a song like Dead Man's Party without thinking, even briefly, about Ub Iwerks' crazily life-like dancing, music-making, singing and even scheming skeletons.

I also won't pretend that the Oingo Boingo skeleton motif led me to my fascination with horror movies and books; I was already there by that point, I just merely needed to play catch-up like any teenager does when he discovers fun or shocking new worlds to discover. It is a game of catch-up that I have played my entire life, and will continue to play. Just as with the likely effect such movies and cartoons had on the Elfman boys growing up, and as with any person, I am merely a Frankenstein's monster patched together from the influences and experiences of my youth. If seeing The Skeleton Dance at an early age led me to eventually to further exploration of the fields macabre, and if seeing Spooks for the first time as a teenager, at roughly the same time that I first happened upon Oingo Boingo, helped solidify that fascination, then so be it.

As James Burke would point out, our lives, and indeed, all of history, are marked by "connections". Some would call them "coincidences" and some would point to "fate" and "destiny". All I know is that I enjoy animations with skeletons in them, and whether it is from a fleeting connection with a beloved band from my youth or from a prepubescent viewing of an Ub Iwerks cartoon, one cannot surmise.

All I know is that I dig 'dem bones...